by Julie Masis 6/18/17 Clockwise, from left: Rhea Clyman’s photo in the 1933 Toronto Telegram; a ‘Red Train’ of carts taking first harvest of produce to Soviet government warehouses; starving children affected by the famine. (All photos public domain) While driving through the Ukrainian countryside in 1932, Rhea Clyman, a Jewish-Canadian journalist, stopped in a […]

By Rhona Lewis – 19 Sivan 5777 – June 12, 2017 Photo Credit: Benas Gerdziunas Richard in the classroom Who is telling Lithuanians about the Jewish communities that vanished during World War II? Richard Schofield, founder and Creative Director of the International Centre for Litvak Photography (IC4LP), has brought together a group of Lithuanian activists […]

MOSCOW — Police in Moscow used megaphones to order anticorruption protesters to disperse as several hundred people began marching down Tverskaya Street, a central thoroughfare. There was a heavy police presence throughout the area, and RFE/RL correspondents saw at least five people being detained. Russian media reported that at least 50 people had been detained […]

(JTA) — An Estonian nationalist politician vowed in his election campaign to decriminalize Holocaust denial and instead penalize those who would downplay the Soviet domination of the country. Georg Kirsberg, who is running for a lawmaker’s seat for the Conservative People’s Party in Estonia’s elections in October, was quoted Wednesday by the Estonian National Broadcasting […]

May 26, 2017 (JTA) — Seventy-five years after the Nazis declared that Estonia was “Jew free,” the Baltic country’s president celebrated the return of Jewish life there at an event attended by Israeli politicians and rabbis. President Kersti Kaljulaid received the guests, including Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, David Lau, at a ceremony Thursday in Tallinn, […]

May 19, 2017 (JTA) — For the second time this year, Russian authorities have ordered out of the country a foreign Chabad rabbi who had lived there for years. This week, a Moscow district court ordered Yosef Khersonsky, an Israeli who heads one of the capital’s communities, to leave the Russian Federation in connection with […]

May 19, 2017 (JTA) — Two swastikas were painted on the front door of a synagogue in western Ukraine and, in a separate incident, the headstone of a prominent rabbi’s grave was smashed. The incident involving the swastikas was discovered last week in Chernivtsi, a city located some 250 miles southwest of Kiev, according to […]

As Ukrainian PM Volodymyr Groysman winds up a three-day visit to Israel, Jews back home try to cope with economic difficulties and the effects of war BY SUE SURKES May 17, 2017 Children at Tikva’s kindergarten preparing materials for the Jewish festival of Lag B‘Omer, Odessa, Ukraine, May 12, 2017. (Photo Sue Surkes ODESSA, Ukraine — At […]

“I’m telling you one more time – go to hell, kikes”, wrote senior officer affiliated to the intelligence services In the latest of a series of highly public antisemitic statements by prominent figures in Ukraine, a retired Ukrainian general affiliated with the country’s intelligence services this week called for the destruction of his country’s Jewish […]

On VE day, Jews and Christians gather near Uman to unveil a monument to 1,000 Jewish children murdered by the Nazis By Sue Surkes May 9, 2017 Ukrainian schoolchildren recite poetry at the unveiling of a memorial to 1,000 Jewish children massacred by the Nazis in a forest in Uman in 1942. May 8, 2017. […]